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once every time. The farmer told me this by way of cautioning me to be careful around her. “She has sweet eyes,” he said, “but she is not sweet.” Maybe, I thought, that was why he had left her alone in that corral all these years.
    Carol’s corral was right next to the big pasture where I was learning to herd sheep with my dog, and I would see her staring at me. It unnerved me. She seemed to be trying to tell me something, but since I had never come near a real donkey in my life, I had no idea what it was she might be saying.
    I felt bad for her, in the way middle-class people who grew up in cities feel bad for animals who live their natural lives out in the real world. We just can’t help but project feelings into their heads. I just assumed she was hungry, and she seemed quite lonely all by herself in that corral, staring at me.
    The first time I brought her apples, I walked over to the corral, my pockets stuffed with some big, red, juicy ones. Carol leaned over the fence, grabbed the first apple—and nearly my thumb with it—and crunched it judiciously and hungrily. My dog was standing back, staring at Carol, trying to keep an eye on the sheep who were grazing nearby.
    I reached for another apple, but Carol was not willing to be patient. She walked right through the fence, dragging wire and fence posts behind her, put her ears down, and charged my terrified dog, who took off toward the other side of the pasture. The sheep needed no invitation to leave, and they took off in the other direction. Carol then turned to me, ripped the apple out of my pocket, and began nosing my other pockets for more.
    “Hey, hey,” I said, not sure what commands to give a donkey. I was shocked to realize she could have walked through the fence any day of those sixteen years she had spent there had she chosen to. It was my first real demonstration of donkey thinking. The first rule of the donkey ethos: everything is their idea.
    It took a while for the irritated farmer to get Carol back inside—a loaf of bread did it—and he warned me in no uncertain terms to leave her alone.
    I couldn’t do that, of course. Every time I came herding, I brought apples and carrots. I would climb into her corral with the treats so she would have no reason to bust out.
    There are some people who are deeply drawn into the rescue of animals. I am not one. I think in some ways animal rescue is too intense for me, too difficult. Perhaps that’s one reason I love happy, healthy, well-bred working dogs. I love to do things with them; I love the way they enter my life easily and come along with me.
    But I fell in love with Carol, this grumpy, independent creature. I worried about her. I wanted to help her. It did somethingfor me—something selfish—to treat her well. It fed something inside of me.
    In her own way, she was quite affectionate with me. She loved it when I rubbed the inside of her ears or tickled the sides of her nose. She would not let me brush her, and if I didn’t have an apple, she would lower her head and butt me in the side or rear end. Carol made no pretense about our relationship—she wanted the apples, and if she felt like it, she might allow me to show her some affection. Or not. Donkeys cannot be bought or bribed, only appeased.
    And Carol … well, she was not very nice. She wouldn’t have fit into one of those cute donkey tales in cartoons and movies. Sometimes you had to like the idea of her more than Carol herself. This was perhaps the first inkling I had about the vagaries of compassion—we tend to feel it for people and animals we like; it is hard to feel it for people and animals we don’t like.
    Whenever I was out herding, Carol would come over to the fence and hang her head on the outside, her ears turning like radar scanners, eyeing me soulfully with her big brown eyes. Somehow, it seemed as if I were her human, and she was my donkey, even though my home at the time was in suburban New Jersey, where donkeys